The language of “more” — more inequality, more poverty, more imprisonment, more environmental destruction, and on, is insufficient to mark the proliferation of extreme versions of familiar conditions we are seeing worldwide. InExpulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy Saskia Sassen develops concepts that seek to capture the extreme character of these conditions. She writes of predatory formations — mixes of elites, technical capacities, global networks, laws, accounting rules, government policies, and of how we measure economic growth by economically ”cleansing” vast numbers of the unemployed and failed businesses. Re-establishing some sense of social justice is a practical but also a conceptual challenge.

In this LSE Cities public lecture, Sassen will share reflections from Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. The book explores how today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations can be understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

She will be joined by Ash Amin, 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge as respondent, and by Ricky Burdett, Director of LSE Cities as chair.

After the event, there will be a book signing and an opportunity to purchase copies of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.